Japan Mobsters Don’t Share Tsunami Pain: William Pesek

March 7 (Bloomberg) -- A year after an earthquake in Japan
touched off the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl, here’s the
question on my mind: Who’s going to jail?

The news media are asking the obvious and safe questions
ahead of March 11: How well did the government respond? Whither
the devastated northeast? What’s the economic effect? When might
the 52 of 54 nuclear reactors mothballed since then reopen?

This barrage of “anniversary” articles misses the point.
Anniversaries commemorate events in the past, ones for which
there is a modicum of closure. Radiation is still venting into
the air around Fukushima. Makeshift equipment, some held in
place by tape, is keeping vital reactor systems operating. Is
Japan’s 3/11 history? Not unless we change the definition.

What the first anniversary of the disaster requires is a
dose of accountability. We need a few good perp walks by current
and past Tokyo Electric Power Co. executives, whose arrogance,
negligence and corruption sent radiation clouds Tokyo’s way.
Next on the docket should be the government officials who
enabled what more closely resembles an organized crime syndicate
than an energy sector.

For years, this crowd ignored warnings of a 3/11-like
catastrophe. When it occurred, they claimed the tsunami was
beyond anything anyone ever imagined. We Tokyoites must demand
that some high-ranking indictments fly because the prime
minister of the moment, Yoshihiko Noda, won’t. Over the weekend,
Noda said that no individual can be held responsible for the
nuclear fallout and that everyone should “share the pain.”

Buyer’s Remorse

It was a jawdropping comment, one that explains why, six
months into the job, Noda’s days are numbered. Voters aren’t
just experiencing buyer’s remorse, but sacker’s remorse, too.
Low approval rates nudged Noda’s predecessor, Naoto Kan, from
office after 14 months. Never mind that Kan saved my life, and
those of my fellow Tokyoites.

In the darkest moments of the Fukushima meltdown, Japan
considered evacuating Tokyo’s 13.1 million people. Consider
where the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Stoxx Europe 600
Index might be if the financial capital of one of the three most
international currencies were an uninhabitable wasteland. This
isn’t the stuff of John le Carre novels or Tom Clancy’s
imagination. It’s the reality that Tokyo navigated 12 months
ago.

Kan wasn’t having it. In the days after the magnitude-9.0
earthquake, he got wind that Tepco wanted to evacuate all
workers from Fukushima. That would’ve ensured apocalyptic
radiation leaks from more than 10,000 spent fuel rods, which the
Einsteins at Tepco stored in relatively unprotected pools near
the reactors. Kan stormed into Tepco’s headquarters on March 15
and demanded that its engineers stay on and handle the crisis.

It was a very un-Japanese thing to do in a culture
programmed for propriety. Yet desperate times call for
culturally questionable measures, and Kan saved Tokyo. Was his
overall leadership state of the art? No. He failed to offer the
transparency the citizens of any democracy deserve.

Yet 12 months on, the Fukushima whitewash is in high gear.
Noda’s first act as prime minister, remember, was to reverse
Kan’s most important policy shift: reining in the nuclear
industry and finding energy alternatives in one of the most
seismically active nations.

Kan was a goner the second he took on the alliance of
politicians, bureaucrats and power companies promoting reactors.
His proposal to halt plans for 14 new reactors shook the
nuclear-industrial complex to its core. The knives came out for
Kan, and Japan’s docile media played along.

Nuclear Mob

Noda made life safe again for the nuclear mob. He’s giving
them a get-out-of-jail-free card that ensures Japan will learn
little from 3/11. It’s funny, really. The world fixates on
Japan’s organized crime groups. Even the Obama administration is
freezing assets of Japan’s largest yakuza network, the
Yamaguchi-gumi. What about the nuclear mob? Its members might
not have full-body tattoos and missing fingers, but they’re far
more dangerous to our planet.

Noda says the entire Japanese establishment had been taken
in by the “myth of safety” and it’s all a do-over. At the same
time, that establishment also propagated the now laughable
argument that nuclear power is clean, safe and cheap.

Clean? Ask Japanese school kids who are afraid of the
vegetables on their plates. Safe? Not unless we build reactors
out of rubber and elevate them on huge shock absorbers. Cheap?
Japan will spend hundreds of billions of dollars cleaning up
Tepco’s mess.

But no worries. We’re going to share the pain. Why should
the nuclear industry and its shareholders pay the bill when
Japanese taxpayers can?

People are going to jail at Olympus Corp. for cooking the
books. In 2007, Internet entrepreneur Takafumi Horie of Livedoor
Co. was locked up for book cooking. In the 1970s, even a former
prime minister went to prison in the Lockheed Corp. scandal. Why
is no one in handcuffs for cooking northeastern Japan?

Most Japanese don’t want a nuclear future, yet they’re
being strong-armed into submission. If that’s not a crime, I’m
not sure what is.

(William Pesek is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions
expressed are his own.)